Reviews for The clashing worlds of economics and faith

The average rating for The clashing worlds of economics and faith based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-13 00:00:00 Allet Barua A very readable and interesting book on the history of modern democracy and the Christian ethic, especially as experienced in America, through the prism of mainly Protestant Christianity, as well as Catholic Christianity. The author makes the strong case of dissociating Christianity from its support for capitalism as it's normally thought of due to the great opposition of Christianity towards Marxism. Here are a few excerpts of note: "Although the word capitalist nowhere appears in the writings of the Founding Fathers, they, as we have noted, were uneasy about the tendency in societies for wealth to accumulate in the hands of the "the few" at the cost of "the many," and for luxury to undermine the moral fiber of a people, leading inevitably to their degeneration and downfall. They clearly considered "commercial liberty" an important aspect of that larger liberty guaranteed to all (slaves aside). If capitalism was not in the vocabulary of the Founders, it soon manifested in the real world. Banks were the essence of capitalism; no banks, no capital and hence no capitalism. But an essentially agricultural people feared and distrusted banks and bankers. It was one of the relatively few things John Adams and his friend Thomas Jefferson agreed upon--the perniciousness of banks and bankers. The trouble with banks was that they made money with other people's money." - pg. 138 "As early as 1874, Horace Bushnell, a Congregational minister, had made the same point. "Evil, once beginning to exist, inevitably becomes organic and constructs a kind of principate or kingdom opposite to God....Corrupt opinions, false judgments, bad manners, and a general body of conventionalism that represent the motherhood of sin, come into vogue and reign, and so, doubtless, everywhere and in all the worlds, sin had it in its nature to organize, mount into the ascendant above God and truth and reign in a kingdom opposite to God." This, in fact, was the condition of so-called American capitalism: "it wished to usurp God's kingdom and have no measure of its conscience but that of its own devising." The real task of Christianity was therefore not the defense of Christian orthodoxy against the assaults of skeptics and free0thinkers, but the extension of the teachings of Christianity ever wider into the world." - pgs. 154-155 "The city of God is, of course, neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant. It is the city of all faithful Christians of whatever division or denomination. If the story of Protestant Christianity has been the most dramatic and significant story since the sixteenth century, we should bear in mind that for some fifteen hundred years the Roman Church held the world together. It preserved through tumultuous and desperate times the dogma, doctrine, vision, and the dream of the unity of mankind. It elevated the status of women through the cult of the Virgin, through nuns as the brides of Christ, through the ideal of chivalric love to a status far higher than that accorded women in any other of the great religions of the world. The vast hierarchy of the Church, however corrupt it became in the end, worked for a thousand years to keep scholarship and learning alive, and, in a hundred specific and identifiable ways, to lay the foundations for the modern world. It must be kept in mind also that the first Reformers--John Wycliff, Martin Luther, Jan Hus, and hundreds of others--were themselves priests trained in the teachings of the Roman Church and determined to restore it to health." - pgs. 197-198

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-27 00:00:00 Dwayne A Day I'm not so sure I follow or maybe it's that I don't agree with or buy into much of what is put forth by the aunthor and yet there were sparks here and there which spoke to me of past moments in history and some which eerily enough or perhaps tellingly reflect upon much of what I sense as amiss in our current situation in not only our country but globally as a result of the huge financial crisis which has engulfed all in the recent years. I may find myself returning to this once it settles but as I'm a bit underwhelmed by it generally I can only give it an okay mark.